The New Republic declares war on Feldman, with the New York Times turning what is minor publication into a major platform. But let me start with the truest thing in the attack - it isn't a review because it never correctly states what is in the book:

To believe that the “enemy” frame is impossible for us to resist — that our behavior as citizens flows, robotlike, from the way we are manipulated by buzzwords — is to see us as Shakespeare saw those laughably malleable Romans in “Julius Caesar”: they are inspired first to hate Caesar by Brutus’ speech and then to love him by Antony’s, in the space of minutes. This scene is terrifying because it reveals that even though Caesar has just been assassinated to preserve the Republic, the Republic is already dead. Its people are unfit for it. So, too, with us, if our minds are governed by keywords.

Yes, Eve Fairbanks, the old Republic is dead, and the minds of people in a media state ebb and flow around keywords. But it is not our minds, but our actions which are so governed. The attack by Fairbanks disguises a profound agreement with Feldman about what, and a profound greed and arrogance on the part of Fairbanks. There is a brew of self-interest here, and that she is unable to sort out her parochial interests from her disagreements with the author, shows how muddled and confused thinking is at the highest levels of our society.

Let me do what Fairbanks does not, explain Feldman.

The basic idea springs from the doctrine of incorporation: the mind is carried out by the physical brain. If the brain, the physical thing, enacts what we see as the consciousness and the mind, then how the brain carries that out will determine the shape of thinking. This idea is as important as the revolution of Galileo that saw the heavans as being run by the same forces that governed bodies on earth, and is driven by the new means of seeing the brain at work.

One physical funciton of the brain is to block or enhance particular connections, to radically speed up thought, or to promot action in a particular direction. The most obvious example is how testosterone not only speeds up certain connections, it slows down others, in order to direct action along one particular path. It is by this means that Minsky's Society of the Mind is able to engage the world. Normally beyond democratic in the interplay between its different parts, when action is the purpose, the brain closes out certain voices, and raises others. And thinking on a subject to depth is action, because it will join certain parts powerfully on a permanent basis, and create memory. Memory is a physical activit as much as lifting or healing a broken bone.

Thus a frame is the process of using words, images, concepts to put a person in what could be called "a state of mind" - where certain connections and analogies flow obviously and easily, while others, no less plausible on their face, are made difficult or dangerous. Call something a war, and the fight or flight mechanism is invoked, certain actions become the obvious first choices, and if these are exhausted there is confusion before the next most likely are selected.

Fairbanks' eyes probably glazed over somewhere in there, and that is part of the problem.

A frame then is like the playing field within which actions are decided. This comes from what Paglia calls the ontological truth - the universe is bigger than we are. And one can add, and it has a great deal more processing power. Thus for an intelligence to act, it must engage in strategies which allow it, within narrow confines, to outcompute the ultimate general purpose computer. To use metaphor: we are super specialized graphics chips, the universe is a massively parallelled ultra computer by comparison. We can do what we do, only if we optimize for it.

Frames are powerful then, not because they are, as Fairbanks would supersitiously posit, forces, but, instead, they are the shapes within which we think. An unframed person has more choices, but cannot as easily either formulate action, or communicate it. The visionary mystic of zen seeks to break all frames, and then replace them with the frameless frame. The rest of us are stuck changing our frames like our cloths.

The power of a frame is that it makes some choices obvious, and some actions at a much lower threshold - it lowers the internal cost and resistance of particular connections, at the expense of others. For example, a palentologist searching for bones might well walk past an interesting geological formation, simply because, it is not a bone. Frame out the other side's solution, and suddenly, no matter how obviously right that solution is, the body politic is frozen like a squirrel caught between its flight distance and its food impulse, or will walk right past it as if it were not there.

Thus framing is both essential, and dangerous. Logicians have understood this for centuries, because the question of premisses comes up constantly. As do questions of semantics determing out come, as well as the concepts of begging the question and arguing in circles.

Politics, as the art of the possible, lives by creating frames, because within frames, people can act more quickly. A healthy society must have means of breaking its own frames, when they produce results that are incorrect or inequitous. One way is to submit disputes to the law, which breaks the frame of a personal dispute, and puts it in the context of Kant's moral imperative: "What result can be duplicated by everyone?"

Frames are, then, the means by which any society enhances and shapes the actions of itself.

One important framing mechanism is to invoke the frame, draw the listener into the frame for the sake of following the argument, and then weld it to powerful images and rhythmic constructions of speech, such that it becomes difficult to leave it. This is the power of oratory - to draw people into a world, and then craft such a compelling experience that all others become less real.

Frames are not ideas - though they can be generated by ideas, and are reflections of ideas. An idea is a means for joining two different symbol systems in the brain so that both can be used to think about the same problem, with the results of one moveable to another. An frame, by making certain pathways faster, and other slower, makes it easier to use the idea. A paradigm is the series of frames and their relationship to the ideas. "Get" a paradigm and what has happened is that the pathways between different areas of the brain that correspond to the communicable form of the idea are open, and others are more closed. This is not generally linear - there are closer and farther means. Much of mathematics is finding trap doors so that one can shuttle without detours to more distant realms.

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This is background, Feldman's specific contribution is to get incisive about the frames that American President's and leaders have used in the past to turn disorganized emotion into organized action. If frames are what we live in, we should then understand how they are made, used, and unmade. Fairbanks fumbles this - ideas and frames are not antithetical, a frame is the means by which an idea is made active.

A frame turns an idea from labor, into capital - by framing, an idea goes from being the difficult and conscious act of a few, to the easy and unconcious act of many. Feldman explores the process of creation of political capital itself. This is no small bore idea, or observation - but instead what Feldman has produced is a series of case studies in how to look at the transition from idea, into frame. Since the process of turning ideas into frames, frames which produce new ideas that are compatible with the original one, is the markovian machine of politics, this is essential.

Let me repeat the important concept - ideas connect, frames bind, and once a frame is established, new ideas, and subsidiary frames, are produced. This process then produces the complex texture of a paradigm, society, game or style. It continues to produce new complexity and fractal density at each level. The essential requirement of a successful idea -> frame iteration, is that the frame produces new ideas that produce new frames which are both self-similar and self-congruent. That is people can tell they are the same, and people can do them the same way.

These case studies have a series of brilliant observations, and once one grasps the important point - that the frame is the step by which ideas generate new ideas - just as those new ideas are intent on generating new frames - one sees why the transition from idea to frame is not "cynical", but instead essentially liberating. Feldman, you see, committs the great heresy in the top down world.

He wants consumers to produce. And for that Fairbanks dumped a load of scalding shit from the ramparts of the New York Times.

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Feldman argues that for Democracy in our own age to work, it must be participatory. I will cast a sidelong glance at the work of Henry Jenkins about participatory culture, and mention again the work of Larry Lessig and Linus Torvalds, in how the participatory production of symbols is more powerful than the localized production and enforcement of symbols. That is, a distributed idea society is more powerful than an excessively centralized one.

This is heresy in the top down world. Fairbanks demands that we go back to that world. Big important people are paid lots of money to push things down, and little people - little people like Dr. Feldman - are allowed to comment and react. And not get paid very much for it. Top. Down.

Feldman argues that only people who are aware of how frames are created, destabilzed, changed, used, can participate fully in a conversation. That only by being able to break the frame that strangles a converstation, can there be that theoretical equality of discourse. In short, only by knowing when an argument has been dishonestly or incompetently framed, can the the ordinary person act in the society we live in today.

And Fairbanks doesn't like that, not one bit. Instead, she frames Feldman with one of the most important moral lessons of our neo-victorian age. She tells the peons that a smart peon is a danger, and they should kill it before it multiplies. This too, is an important concept.

The consumer society has to deal with a vast mass, even though the size of decision making has stayed the same. The number of people who can decide is fixed by our interplay and communication. A government which allows 10 people to decide for 1000 will not work for 10 people deciding for 100,000,000. To enforce the relationship between a decision, and its enactment, societies create means by which the decisions of the 10 ripple outwards. I will, in most societies, be many different groups of 10 people in different circumstances. The 10 are not a conspiracy - and may well be antagonists, competitors. Jobs and Gates are in dialog about what a personal computer should be. That does not mean they are on the same side.

In our society, one of the important preconditions of power, is that the ordinary consumer be as close to an entropy actor as possible. That is, acting only on the forces visible and present - what he wants to eat today, who he wants to fuck tomorrow, where he wants to live next year. The texture of these unexamnined decisions produces the medium in which production occurs. Only by having an essentially liquid vat of desire, can the top down "New Industrial System" which Galibraith described function. Only in this way is the neo-classical market "efficient". Only in this way can the disequilibria that leads to stampedes of politics - from which come the totalitarian movements - be prevented.

This is no small thing, the early 20th century was an exercise in disequilibrium. The 19th century, in fact, was an extremely revolutionary time, and made revolution easy. Too easy in fact. It assumed in a variety of ways that equilibrium was normal and self enforcing - whether God's Law or Say's Law, the Victorian saw a vast steady state Nature which enforced normalcy. Catastrophism was relegated to religion, slow uniformitarianism was in. This became glacial as the century wore on. Paradoxically, two truths made a lie - the idea of uniformitarianism and the gradual realization of how big and old the universe was. Remember that in 1890, people thought the world was a few million years old, that is scientists. Why? Because the only energy source that they knew of that could power the sun was gravity, and gravity would only provide a short time for geology and life.

Now think on this - if you pack all of geolgoical history into a few million years - then you live in a catastrophic universe - events fly by, human society rests in a very fragile state, which can and will collapse. In even 100 million years, think of the rise and fall of mountains. As the earth grew older, history, cosmic and otherwise, grew longer and slower, and slower. Stretch that to 4 billion years - the length of time that radioactivity says the earth roughly is - and suddenly the universe is sedate, slow and quiet. Equilibrium looks more and more self-enforcing. When Wegener proposed that continents drifted, it was laughed at.

Thus in a world of enforced equilibrium, people have huge scope for violent action. And the Victorians used it to conquer the world more or less.

The first half of the "short 20th century" - from 1914 to 1991 - is devoted to the concept of the dangers of disequilibrium in an age when people have access to mechanization and mass communication. This applies to both states and individuals. The mechanized military is capable of destruction in a matter of hours that would take an industrialized army weeks and the pre-industrial army years. Individuals have far more power to move, push and cause destruction.

As importantly, the ability to rapidly move means that disequilibrium is more destructive. The 19th century saw vast amounts of economic and political disequlibrium - massive immigration, the conquest of new areas, economic depressions, wars of unification. While the early 20th century looked back at the 19th century as a simpler more placid time, this was by comparison with World War I, and the disruptions of the mechanized economy. Having grown up in the relatively stable late Victorian, they did not recognize how turbulent the transition had been.

The synthesis that came out of the two world wars included the division of society into producers and consumers. The essential purpose of the "Affluent Society" was to create Democracy in a system which had undemocratic underpinnings – an inequality of access to the ability to access the mass production system was built in. A record company could make endless copies of a song, a consumer could not. The power of the mass production society created a series of gatekeepers, to make sure that people not fit to control it did no rise, or could not stay, in power. Huey Long had to be shot. Joseph McCarthy was killed by a question.

And so we come to the degenerate stage, where the gatekeepers think of themselves as intrinsically meritorious. Such as Eve Fairbanks.

To give you an idea of how little respect Eve Fairbanks has, how little common decency, how little intellectual honesty, she lectures Dr. Feldman about extended exposition, when she has never written a successful book. Then she blows, out right, basic American History:

Why would Lincoln have spent six years before he was elected in 1860 on a single-minded crusade to convince people that “all men are created equal” was the foundation, the “ancient faith,” of American government, if all it took was the right framing to get them in a mood to abolish slavery?

To this I must ask, was Eve Fairbanks drunk or sleeping during class. First Lincoln did not spend 6 years before 1860 on a crusade over equality. His crusade, from when he was a Whig, was to preserve the Union. Read again, if you will, the first inaugural, where he begs and pleads with the South to come back into the fold. He offers up almost complete capitulation on slavery, where it exists in order to preserve the Union. In 1864, Lincoln, who had been the first President to win as a Republican in the modern incarnation of the party, ran on the "Union" ticket, with a Democrat as his running mate. Eve Fairbanks pisses on Feldman, and then cannot get basic simple facts right. This complete blunder is then published in the "paper of record". Think on that if you will, the New York Times presumes to either rewrite history, or to say that it is no longer in the accuracy business.

As for why it took so many attempts, the first answer is that Lincoln had tried several frames before. He had reached for biblical ones – saying that the black man was equal in his right to eat bread for example. But most importantly, he had not seen, himself, until the Civil War was well begun, that slavery and the Union were incompatible, and that the Constitution of 1787 was an insufficient instrument as it had been interpreted to that point in time for the purpose of maintaining the Union.

Without these two essential pieces, the three ideas which Lincoln used to reformulate American government do not cohere. Lincoln himself, was caught in a frame. That frame was the Constitution as a contract between states. A kind of super-treaty between parties who must give and take. In that view, the Constitution could not suspend property rights in slaves, because the government was in no way party to the contract of the buying and selling of slaves. The money was metal and existed outside of the state, the contract was between individuals who had the rights to what they sold. As a contract between states, Lincoln, to preserve the Union, was willing to free all the slaves, free none, free some but not others.

Thus Lincoln could not see the solution, because his own frame blocked his field of vision. Without the key frame – as Feldman is endlessly at pains to point out, a difficult and painful process of creation, and a momentous occasion when it is successful, which is why he chooses important speeches – then people do not know where to look.

Once Lincoln abandoned the notion that the solution to the problem was a negotiation in terms of a contract – something which he would hold too until what seemed to be a short war of the style of that era turned into a blood bath – he would then take two years to find his own, new frame. Because Fairbanks is a lying cynic – because anyone who gets such a simple point of American history dead wrong is either lying, or cares so little for the truth because of privileged position as to be unremittingly cynical, or both – she acts as if the creation of a frame is easy, and merely a matter of a means to get little people to do what you want. As Feldman explains, adoption of a frame is not merely spin, but is, instead, a change in outlook and ones sense of possibility. It is this expansion of freedom for adopting a frame that is missing from Fairbanks' grossly distorted and willfully inaccurate reading of the book. One does not spin others into frames, one adopts a frame, and then proves by thought word and deed to ones fellows that it is a better way to look at the world.

She does this to invoke peonism, the morality of the entropy consumers, doing what feels good, and canceling each other out. The morality of peons is that someone too aware must either be a producer – or is an infection to be destroyed. The too smart peon is the antagonist of sitcoms – by trying to lie their way out in order to get something, rather being happy with what they get. The too smart peon is the manipulator.

Fairbanks, by accusing Feldman of being the "smart kafir" – is attempting to raise up a response of peons against him. He frame is that she is a big person, and he is a little person. The princess of the New York Times then tells the little people to tear him to ribbons. The response has already been the reverse. Because I do not own a bird, I have no use for Eve Fairbank's *hiterary output, I wouldn't be writing these words, if she had not made a direct attack on ideas that I hold to be as essential to our democracy as the words "We The People".

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But less us answer Ms. Eve Fairbanks' fatuous and obvious question about Mr. Lincoln.

In 1862 Lincoln finally understands that the solution to his problems is not in the Constitution of 1787, nor merely in the revolutionary and democratic vision of 1776. Both alone, justify slavery. Either by contract or natural right to property, alone, slavery wins the argument. It waited for him to break his own frame that America was about a contract, and about personal freedom to act and hold. It awaited that moment when Lincoln saw in Jefferson a man like himself, who was ready to end slavery as incompatible with the principles of the new nation. Jefferson too was a believer in perpetual and indissoluble Union, and, while a slave owner, a believer that the peculiar institution would have to end.

This first piece – that the war was not over the question of slavery – a word that does not appear directly or indirectly in the Gettysburg address – but over the conception of man, and the nature of the American experiment. Lincoln found a Lockean country, and realized that Locke could not hold together the forces that spun the nation apart.

The second piece is also writ large in the Address – the unlimited grant of necessity. If, on one hand, the Address preaches a new gospel of human dignity, it also preaches the gospel that the Union within which this human dignity exists is so precious that it makes unlimited demands for the last, full, measure of devotion.

Thus freedom is not freedom of property, and law is not contract. Instead, Lincoln must find a frame which gives people a different relationship to their government. One that justifies a war which was then highly unpopular, and which had consumed thousands of lives in just the previous days. One that justifies both the abrogation of private contracts, and the enshrinement of human diginity. Thus Lincoln understood that to do this, he had to make ordinary citizens contracting parties. "We the People" no longer consisted of the legislature acting according to the votes of an elite electorate, but all people. This overturned notions such as Barron v Baltimore, where even arch-Federalist Marshall agreed that the Federal Government could not make the Bill of Rights binding on the states. Within a decade of Gettysburg, a Constitutional Amendment was ratified with the intent to do just that.

The frame of equality comes from an idea – the linkage of the Union to dignity. In the deist and contractual Constitution, it is the prohibition against unnatural aristocracy that is the assurance of liberty – the red tooth and claw of checks and balances. Nature is equality in that early Romantic view. Lincoln's frame is that equality is not default state of man – he goes to Hobbes in effect, and argues that without a government of the people, by the people and for the people – there will be no equality.

In doing so we see the Idea – he is connecting the Democratic narrative of the Declaration of Independence, with the Republican narrative of the Constitution. Instead of two opposite principles – Democracy and Republic – he argues that they are one and the same.

This is a frame – if human dignity requires constitutional government, and constitutional government requires a nation of human dignity, then there is no question of slavery. Ending slavery is incidental to the perpetual Union.

We see this frame in much larger ways that abolition in the post-civil War jurisprudence. Consider the declaration that the government having the right to issue "legal tender" in the form of paper money – Chase thought it unconstitutional, even as he did it under orders. He later rules it so as a justice. This is overturned.

The frame of Gettysburg then is that there is a higher law than contract, and the Union may break contracts should it be essential to the purpose of perpetuation that "which is as close to eternal as anything by man can be."

And to answer Fairbanks, if Americans have forgotten that the frames we live in, like the laws we make, are not shat down on high from the New York Times or the Republican Party, or the Federalist Society, or the Project For A New American Century, or FOXNews, then indeed, we are no longer fit to keep our Republic.

By arguing that Americans must assume among the powers of heaven and earth the right to decide, not merely which brand of politics to buy, but how the process of politics shall work, and how decisions shall be made, he is acting as a Patrick Henry to a new birth of American freedom. Demanding, as the play Inherit the Wind declares, the right that god gives a sponge.

The right to think.